Thoughts on PodCamp Montreal: Funner than a trailer full of dirt!

PodCamp Montreal, also known as iFest Montreal, presented last Saturday and Sunday by some of Montreal’s most prominent podcasters and social media gurus was a great time, and great opportunity to actually meet some of the people we see on twitter and listen to while plugging away at some repetitive re-configuration task.

There were a lot of great presentations on the schedule, and only got to see three of them. They’re all available online though, so I’m going to go back a watch a few of the ones I missed!

I really liked Sylvain Grand’Maison talking about Twitter vs. Podcasting. He brought out some really good stats that showed podcasting was much more popular than twitter (in Canada) but also explained why twitter would always get more attention: it’s measurable – the marketing people can make graphs of their successful web 2.0 campaigns. The most interesting thing I took away from his presentation was to always put geographical information in the description of your podcast since a lot of people look for podcasts from where they are, or where they’re going, or where they’re from.

Laurent LaSalle‘s introduction to podcasting was great. Even though I’ve been doing this for three seasons now he had a lot of great advice. Especially his seven rules for podcasting (which actually contained nine rules, but that’s okay since the seventh rule was “forget the rules”). The main thrust of his presentation was, like Nike, to just do it. That your style will evolve, your technique will improve, everything will fall into place, and eventually your wife will let you spend $200 on that awesome microphone that will make you De Oratore!

And finally, before I had to leave, the 2FatDads attended Brian Rotsztein‘s presentation about Search vs. Social, or ultimately Search is Social! This could probably have been the most interesting presentation of the day but I found his reverence for Facebook distasteful (maybe not his fault, I generally find all things Facebook distasteful). But the he highlighted the fact that Facebook has 500,000,000 users as if that was regular, active users. We all know that everyone has a Facebook account (I have two) but most people don’t check them that regularly or only only go to check one specific thing and then leave. On the other hand, no one goes to Google’s home page just to look at the logo – they search. 100% of Google’s users are active users!!!

After lunch with my family and unloading 1,000 tons of dirt at Pointe-Claire’s Ecoday (well, it felt like 1,000 tons shoveling it by hand) I returned for the cocktail sponsored by Carpene Malvolti. My apologies to anyone I talked to but don’t remember – that was really great wine!

Looking forward to next year’s podcamp Montreal. Congratulations to all the organizers and thanks to all the sponsors.

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